Bloodmind

by Liz Williams

  ‘Did you set up a colony on Mondhile?’

  ‘No. The people there communicated with us, as they had not done with the Gaians, but they were clans, at war with one another, and there was no land for us to take. It was clear that the scouting party would be killed unless they left, but in any case they had seen enough for a colony to be unnecessary.’

  For once, I was ahead of her. ‘They witnessed the bloodmind.’

  Glyn Apt nodded. ‘They saw women fighting alongside the men – warriors known as feir, who had lost conscious awareness and the power of speech for much of the time, who were in essence feral. Human animals. The condition was partly genetic, and partly tied into ancient technology that runs under the earth of Mondhile, and affects behaviour. Technology that could be replicated, and genes that could be altered.’

  ‘So it wasn’t all Frey’s plan,’ I said. ‘He stole your ideas.’

  ‘We took what we needed to protect our own,’ Glyn Apt said, bristling, ‘and Frey took that for the same reasons. But his understanding was incomplete, and that’s why he went to Mondhile, to find out for himself.’

  ‘And Nhem? Why did he go to Nhem?’

  ‘After what we had seen on Nhem, we sold information to the women of the Nhemish resistance. We hoped they could breed it into the next generation of Nhemish women: release it as a mutagenic virus so that when the women reached puberty, they would turn on the males.’

  ‘It’s that precise? Wouldn’t they turn on one another?’

  ‘Maybe. I doubt if it can be made that precise, to be honest. But you saw what Nhem is like. Any chance of destabilizing the existing order, they take.’

  ‘It can’t have worked – or hasn’t it had time? When did you sell it to them?’

  ‘Several decades ago. And no, it has not had time to work yet. They are still experimenting with it; it was never properly implemented. You’ve met one of the results.’

  I could not think who she meant at first, and then I realized. Something flared deep inside my mind. Idhunn’s coal of information? ‘Skinning Knife?’

  ‘Skadi was created and born on Nhem, one of the first products of the breeding program. Her mother is Mondhaith – they bred her, and another girl, pathogenetically.’

  ‘What happened to the other girl?’

  ‘She’s still on Nhem. There’s a situation developing. But I haven’t had recent word.’

  ‘How did Skinning Knife get from Nhem?’

  ‘The resistance camp was attacked. Skadi was rescued, but the sister was taken. Skadi was sent to the Morrighanu, for training. I suspect that in any case she was more than the Nhemish resistance could handle – perhaps she had already killed, I don’t know, and they realized that they had created a monster, not a saviour. She broke away from her foster mothers, who were one of the extreme sects, lived wild for a time, then was picked up by the vitki. She has had a violent, confused history on Muspell.’

  ‘So why are we going to Mondhile?’

  ‘To find Skinning Knife’s closest living relative,’ Glyn Apt said.

  THIRTY

  PLANET: MONDHILE (VALI)

  Strange, to be returning. After all, I had left Mondhile only a short time before, and I’d thought never to go back again. A beautiful, savage world: one where I had made friends, and enemies. But the enemies were dead now, and there was no reason to be afraid. Perhaps I should seek out Ruan – but something else in me told me to leave him to his life, trouble him no further. I no longer had his sister’s bow: it was back at the Rock, or maybe taken by a Morrighanu as a keepsake. That was appropriate, in a way. I could see why the Morrighanu had sought out Mondhile; they were two of a sort – wild, aggressive, preferring remote places. And perhaps that was true of me, too.

  Skinning Knife: an intended nemesis of Nhem. Given what they’d done, the ruling classes of Nhem deserved everything they’d got. I wondered once more about the aftermath of the Hierolath’s death: had it really had any effect, made any appreciable difference? The women of the Nhemish resistance, desperately grasping at straws of solutions. But it explained why Frey had come with me to Nhem: he’d been looking for clues to Skinning Knife. Maybe he’d known her: was she the link between myself and Gemaley? Lost girls, all with warrior talents, and some missing part of Frey that made him want to be their mentor, their controller? He was dead; I could not ask him, and found that I had no real wish to do so.

  The door whisked open then, and Eld was standing on the threshold.

  ‘They’ve decided to give us a freer rein now we’re out in space.’

  ‘Glyn Apt told me why we’re heading for Mondhile.’

  ‘Yes, she had a word with me, too. This is a fast ship; we’ll be there in a couple of days. She wanted to know whether you wanted to be put out for the duration.’

  ‘I’d rather use the seith,’ I said. Or rather, what’s left of it.

  ‘As you wish.’ Eld withdrew. I lay back on the bed – alone at last – and sank into as much of a trance state as I could muster. Later, it became sleep, an uneasy, unsettled state that eventually turned to deep unconsciousness, mercifully without dreams. When Glyn Apt once more came to wake me, it was to tell me that we had reached Mondhile.

  It looked as it had the last time: a dark world, mottled with crimson that I now knew to be the red leaves of satinspine coming into their spring promise. The immense peaks of arctic mountains split the pole, running down in ridges across the northern continent. As the Morrighanu ship twisted downward, I recognized the glaciated wall of the mountains known as the Otrade, or Snakeback, ghost-white in the sunlight against that oddly green sky. The ship came in fast and low, turning over great river estuaries, the skeins of islands visible along the coast. We were heading inland, towards the mountains. I glimpsed roofs and turrets: settlements few and far between. Despite its clan system, Mondhile was not designed for co-operation. I dreaded seeing Gemaley’s ruined tower rising from one of the crags, but I thought – or hoped – that we were too far north. I was certain that I recognized some of the lakes, however, strung among the mountains like beads. But then we were coming in over a black expanse, a high plateau at the edge of the Otrade, marked with patches of white that I was unable to identify. Some kind of vegetation? Ice? We were coming down, the ship hissing as the stabilizer jets came on.

  ‘What’s this place?’ I shouted to Glyn Apt, over the landing roar.

  ‘It’s a moor. I don’t know what it’s called. It’s where the original team landed; there’s supposed to be an old base here.’

  A sudden silence. We had stopped.

  ‘Well,’ said Thorn Eld. ‘This is going to be interesting.’

  Early evening, Mondhile. Glyn Apt and the Morrighanu crew busied themselves with tests and readings, which from my point of view had all the character of oracular divination. Morrighanu technical speak was encoded, with talk of runes and signs. If Eld understood it, he gave no indication of doing so. We were allowed to go for a walk, as long as we didn’t pass from sight of the ship.

  ‘We’re tagged, anyway,’ Eld said. He held out a hand and I saw a thin red line on the skin at the back of his wrist. ‘You’ve got one, too.’

  When I rolled back my sleeve, I saw that this was the case. So that’s why my wrist had been aching. Yet another invasion. Eld was looking at the scars of my adolescent cuts, again without gloating or any visible pity. After a moment he said, ‘Do you have any idea when it gets dark?’

  ‘This is quite far north, and it’s spring.’ It had been early spring when I arrived on Mondhile, with the buds just coming out, but judging from the red trees I had seen on the way in, spring came quickly here. Perhaps it was a short summer; that made sense. Despite everything that had happened to me here – everything that I had done, too – I still felt strangely at home in this northern place, the quiet, bleak expanse of the moor suiting my sombre mood.

  ‘Glyn Apt said the person we’ve come to see was a relative of Skinning Knife. How are we going to find them?�
�

  ‘She’s a woman. Glyn Apt has some plan involving scanning for genetic markers,’ Eld replied. He seemed ill at ease all of a sudden, at variance with the usual vitki calm, emotions held in severe check. ‘It’s a speciality of the Morrighanu.’

  ‘So why didn’t they just trace Skadi in Morvern?’

  ‘They did. Tracing her is one thing. Catching her, once she’s gone rogue, is another: Skadi can evade capture – you’ve seen how she can come and go in an eye-blink. And Glyn Apt hinted that there was another problem, as well, that Skadi has a way of evading the detection mechanisms. Didn’t Frey change the appearance of his DNA? That’s part of why they want this woman. She’s Mondhaith. She’s more evenly matched with Skadi than even the most enhanced Morrighanu and she might know things which will help catch her.’

  ‘But is she here?’ I looked out across the empty expanse of the moor: black earth, low shrubs whose leaves were indigo and dark green. ‘How do they know?’

  ‘We are here because she is,’ Eld said patiently. ‘We followed her in.’

  Suddenly the evening chill seemed sharper, the moor’s expanse threatening rather than familiar. I thought of those bones, rattling in a forest cottage, of the man lying face down in an icy stream, bleeding out into rosy snowmelt. I remembered a people who turn feral in the blink of an eye.

  ‘She’s here?’ I asked. The seith rippled at the edges, as though I might conjure her up.

  ‘So they tell me.’ Eld looked no happier than I did.

  ‘What if it runs in the family?’ I said, and started to laugh. That was, after all, the whole point.

  ‘I think we should go back to the ship,’ was Eld’s only comment.

  It was growing dark, in any case; twilight creeping over the silent land like a lid coming down, casting the bushes into blue shadow. The lights of the Morrighanu ship looked almost welcoming.

  ‘Did you see anything out there?’ Glyn Apt questioned us. ‘Sense anything?’

  ‘No.’ Neither Eld nor I wanted to tell her that we’d managed to spook ourselves very effectively without external help. But Glyn Apt herself did not look happy, and there were the signs of weariness underneath the dataflow. Her pouchy eyes were red-rimmed.

  ‘All right. Vali, you know this place better than I. What kind of night predators do you get?’

  ‘Well, there are visen. They’re eyeless; they hunt by smell. Something called altru, which I didn’t see, but which everyone was afraid of. The creatures they ride – mur – are wild, too. There seemed to be quite a lot of things, now you mention it.’

  Glyn Apt nodded as though she’d expected this. ‘We stay in the ship. No one goes out until dawn, and then we do a scan first. We’ve just done one, by the way. There’s nothing within a quarter of a mile.’

  I had no problem with that and neither, from the look on his face, did Eld.

  Morning. The seith told me that, and more reliably, so did the dawn light showing through the viewport. Mornings on Mondhile, not many of them, a few days, but always that same quality of light, impossible to define, peculiar to every planet. Mondhile’s was redder than most, perhaps, the huge crimson sun rising over the reach of the moor.

  The curving cell door was unlocked. I stepped into the corridor and found light streaming in, and fresh air overriding the antiseptic no-smell of the ship. A single feather drifted down from the ceiling and I was back in the Rock, watching that single betraying piece of information as it descended.

  Glyn Apt crouched in the open doorway, face pasty in the dawn light. Her skin was entirely free of the dataflow and she was quite still.

  ‘Glyn Apt?’ I said and then, when she did not respond, ‘Commander?’

  No reply. But by that time, I’d heard it for myself. There was a battle out on the moor.

  I ran to the door and looked over the top of Glyn Apt’s head. There must have been a hundred or so: warriors on foot, or mounted on the terrifying fanged beasts that the Mondhaith called mur, halfway between horse and wolf with snaking necks and knowing scarlet eyes. The warriors wore leather armour, like Ruan’s, and they carried bows and swords – intricate, well-crafted weapons stained as red as the sun, or a beast’s eye. The front line was almost all female, perhaps the feir warriors that Glyn Apt had mentioned. They were naked to the waist. Some of them had missing breasts, the skin stretched and shiny with scar tissue. Their hair was matted with what looked like black-and-white lime, and they were heavily tattooed. They reminded me of my Viking ancestors. They looked like lunatics, with their long teeth and claws. I remembered Gemaley and something in me wanted to shrink back into the ship and lock the cell door behind me. Something else in me, however, did not.

  It was easy to sense the bloodmind. It washed against the edges of the seith like a hot red tide, lapping warm as sunlight, pulling me into the fray. I’d have joined them, I think, if the spear hadn’t come out of nowhere.

  Glyn Apt cried out as it shot over her head. I had a split so-this-is-it second to react and know, and then the spear hit me in the gut. The impact should have knocked me backwards – it should have killed me – but instead there was no pain, only a spreading heat, and the spear had gone straight through me. I looked down in wondering shock. No blood. No wound. Nothing.

  Glyn Apt was staring at me as though I’d grown another head.

  ‘What did you do?’

  I’d have loved to have pretended that it was some arcane Skald ability, just to carry on seeing the Morrighanu commander looking so panicked. But I hadn’t the faintest idea what I’d done, or whether I’d even done anything.

  ‘It’s not real,’ Eld commented. He sauntered around the edge of the battle as though out for a morning stroll.

  ‘Then what is it?’ I looked out across the battleground. It seemed real. It even smelled real, blood and earth and shit.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Eld said.

  ‘What were you doing out there?’ I was surprised to find how angry I felt.

  ‘Glyn Apt opened the door and we saw it. There was nothing on the monitors – according to the scanners, the moor’s deserted. Then I saw an arrow go through the ship and I thought it was worth a closer look.’ As Eld spoke, a raven soared down from the sky, perched on his shoulder for a moment, then disappeared. Eld gestured to the place where it had been.

  ‘Recordings. Information. I think that’s what this is.’

  ‘A recording? Broadcast by whom? They’re not that advanced. These people regard wheels as a luxury.’

  Eld shook his head. ‘Again, I don’t know. I was hoping the commander here could shed some light on the subject.’

  Glyn Apt looked uneasy. ‘It might be a Morrighanu device. It might not. There’s all sorts of tech buried in the earth of this planet, all kinds of data transfer devices. The moats around the towns, the energy lines – it’s all a hangover from the ancient colony days. Don’t ask me how it works.’

  ‘And Skinning Knife’s relative?’ I looked again and the battle was gone. The moor was untroubled under the morning sun, mist burning off the black earth like steam. The air smelled of herbs and frost.

  ‘Out there,’ Glyn Apt said. ‘Out there somewhere. And today is the day that we will find her.’

  The search party consisted of Glyn Apt, Eld and myself, armed with Morrighanu weaponry and the DNA scanner. The scanner was a strange thing: I’d expected a metal box, like a tabula, but this was organic, a lumpy thing like a bundle of lichen or moss, with filaments trailing from it. It did not look like any tech to be found on Muspell, but then, I knew little of Morrighanu devices. I wondered whether it might be vitki, but from the curious way that Eld eyed it, perhaps not.

  At least Glyn Apt had unbent sufficiently to endow us with weapons. But under present circumstances, she had no reason to suppose that we were not to be trusted. We’d come here on a Morrighanu ship, after all; we had nowhere to run to on Mondhile, no means of contacting Muspell to ask for someone to come and rescue us. Even if Eld possessed any means of commun
ication, I wasn’t sure that the vitki would bother to rescue him, given the war situation back home and his exchanges with the old man. We were entirely dependent on the Morrighanu, and I wasn’t even sure that they were the enemy, in any case. I suppose I wanted to see them as a kind of Skald, because they were women, and warriors, just as we were. Perhaps something in me had learned to see the Skald as hypocritical, too, because it claimed to love peace, and yet used assassins such as myself, whereas the Morrighanu had no such pretences. But to me, the Morrighanu seemed too reliant on technology; Glyn Apt’s constant dataflow was rendering her more inhuman and, at the same time, making her more vulnerable than the more basic practices of the Skald would. If the dataflow failed, how would Glyn Apt fare then? On Nhem, I’d worried about becoming too reliant on the map implant, and there had been times when technology had let me down in a way that an understanding of the land, of wind and light and shadow, of footprints in the soil and the direction of the flight of birds, never would. Maybe that was why I felt a certain kinship with the Mondhaith.

  And Skinning Knife’s relative, whom we were now setting out to find . . . Would I find the same kinship, the same connection, with her that I’d found with Ruan? Or was she – more likely, I thought gloomily – another Gemaley, fierce and mad, a born killer? Seeing what Skadi had achieved I was beginning to doubt that she’d be anything but the latter. And what about this supposed sister on Nhem?

  Both Glyn Apt and Eld were silent as we made our way across the moor. Glyn Apt was, I thought, intent upon the information that was coming from the DNA device. The dataflow across her skin had changed character: I still couldn’t interpret it, but it seemed denser, packed with odd flickering images. Once I glanced at the Morrighanu and saw that another face had become fleetingly transposed across her own – Mondhaith, with white-on-white eyes and a fanged snarl. I must have flinched back, because Glyn Apt gave me a chilly look and asked what was the matter.